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From pop stars to tefillin pop-ups, Oct. 7 changed how Israel’s ‘somewhat observant’ practice Judaism
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — In the weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, religiously charged videos started circulating on social media. Dozens of young women posted videos of themselves cutting up their “immodest” clothing, jeans, crop tops, minidresses, vowing to replace them with modest skirts and head coverings.
In one viral TikTok clip, a young influencer solemnly shears her wardrobe to shreds, declaring it an offering for national deliverance. “Creator of the world, as I cut these clothes, cut away the harsh decrees against Israel,” she says, explaining that she would not even donate the garments lest she “cause someone else to stumble” by wearing them.
Other images circulated too, of tefillin pop-ups, neighborhood challah-bakes and, on both social media and the street, a noticeable rise in religious amulets and pendants. Hamsas, Stars of David and necklaces shaped like the map of Israel or the ancient Temple in Jerusalem appeared everywhere.
Two years later, as the grinding war in Gaza largely wound down, those early scenes have taken on the feel of a specific moment in time. Still, the spiritual jolt of those first weeks has not fully faded, and increased religious practice has become part of the country’s daily rhythm.
A poll released in November by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that 27% of Israelis have increased their observance of religious customs since the war began. Roughly a third of Jewish Israelis say they are praying more frequently than before the war, and about 20% report reading the Tanach or psalms more often.
JPPI head Shuki Friedman said that many Israelis, and especially the young, felt the war had reconnected them to tradition and Jewish identity “not necessarily in a halachic way, but in a way that shows up very strongly in their lives and in the public space.”
Crucially, the shift has been most dramatic among Israelis who already had one foot in tradition — those raised in “masorti” or traditional but not strictly observant, homes. While the masorti category has its roots in Middle Eastern and North African (Mizrahi) communities, where religious observance was historically more integrated into daily life but less rigid than in European Orthodoxy, today masorti Israelis span all sectors of Israeli society. (The category is distinct from the Masorti movement, the name for Conservative Judaism in Israel and Europe.) Roughly one-third of Israeli Jews identify as masorti, with JPPI breaking the group into two categories: “somewhat religious” and “not so religious.”
The Jewish demographer Steven M. Cohen once quipped that masorti Israelis are those who “violate the laws that they do not wish to change” – meaning they accept traditional Jewish law, known as halacha, as valid, but selectively observe it in practice. Cohen also noted there’s no real American equivalent, though the closest parallel might be “non-observant Orthodox.”
Among young Jews who identified as “somewhat religious” masorti, 51% of respondents in the poll reported deepening their religious practices during the war.
David Mizrachi is one of them. Raised in a masorti home, Mizrachi had never been consistent about synagogue attendance, Shabbat observance or laying tefillin. Since Oct. 7, he said, he does all three — religiously.
For him, the change grew out of the shock of the attacks and the losses that touched his own circle. He personally knew the Vaknin twins, killed at the Nova party, and Elkana Bohbot, the hostage snatched from the rave who was released after two years in captivity. Those events, he said, pushed him into “cheshbon nefesh,” a Jewish reckoning with his identity.
“I understood that these enemies and terrorists came because we were Jewish, not because we were Israelis,” he said.
In some households the response went further still. Rozet Levy Dy Bochy, raised masorti and married to a non-Jewish Dutch man who decided after Oct. 7 to convert, said Oct. 7 drew her deeper into observance.
“It felt like we were in a horror film, but faith provided an anchor,” she said. “Knowing that everything was part of God’s plan and in the end something different, something good, was waiting for us was comforting.”
The dynamic experienced by Mizrachi, shaped by the violence that afflicted people he personally knew, aligns with another survey released in September by the Hebrew University, which found that direct exposure to the war, whether through bereavement or injury, was closely associated with changes in religiosity and spirituality. Roughly half of respondents reported higher levels of religiosity and spirituality, including a quarter who said they had become more religious and a third who described a rise in spirituality.
That trend has been reflected most vividly in the accounts of released hostages that have filled Hebrew media over the past year, with former hostages describing making kiddush on water, keeping Shabbat for the first time or rejecting pitas during Passover in the tunnels beneath Gaza.
It has rippled through pop culture, too. Actor Gal Gadot told her 106 million followers on Instagram that while she’s “not a religious person,” she had decided to light a candle and pray for the safe return of all the hostages.
Israel’s biggest pop star Noa Kirel, not known for religious observance, marked her November wedding with a mikveh immersion, a hafrashat challah (challah-separation) gathering, along with a henna party of the type that is common among Mizrahi Jews.
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Another of Israel’s most popular singers, Omer Adam, long considered secular, now wears tzitzit, studies Torah, and keeps Shabbat.
It’s now common to see Israeli celebrities sharing Shabbat candle-lighting rituals, including secular TV host Ofira Asayag, who, a year into the war, pledged to do so on-air until the hostages came home.
For sociologist Doron Shlomi, who studies Israeli religiosity, none of this is surprising, because collective crises often produce similar effects. Drawing on research from earthquakes, wars and the Covid-19 pandemic, he described the two years of war as “a kind of laboratory” for seeing how people turn toward faith.
“War always brings two things,” he said. “More religiosity and more pregnancies.”
Shlomi argued, however, that the hostages and their families sit apart from the rest of the population. For many of them, he said, a turn to religion was a survival tool, and he expects some will go on to live fully observant lives.
But in the broader public he sees two main patterns. The first is piety as a form of public service and solidarity that manifests in personal habits, like observing a single Shabbat or donning tzitzit in honor of the hostages, the fallen, and the soldiers.
The other pattern runs through institutions and organizations that seized on the moment, from ultra-Orthodox groups like Chabad hosting barbecues on army bases to Christian evangelicals joining support efforts.
Although increases outnumbered declines, the Hebrew University and JPPI studies both found a smaller counter-current. About 14% of secular respondents in both surveys said their religiosity had weakened, and 9% of Jewish respondents in the JPPI poll reported a drop in belief in God, a figure that rose to 16% among secular Jews.
The Hebrew University researchers framed their findings through a psychological lens, drawing on terror management theory, which argues that confronting mortality pushes people to double down on their existing worldviews — deepening religious practice for some and weakening it for others.
“During periods of prolonged stress, individuals may reorganize their religious or spiritual orientations by either increasing or decreasing their importance,” said Yaakov Greenwald, who led the study.
It’s not the first time war has nudged Israelis toward faith. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel experienced a notable uptick in people returning to religion, including high-profile secular figures. Film director Uri Zohar shocked the nation by becoming ultra-Orthodox in 1977. A year later, Effi Eitam, a decorated brigadier general and later a politician, did the same.
Historians debate how large that post-’73 wave really was, but at the time the narrative took hold that the near-death experience of the state — Israel was caught off guard and feared annihilation in the first days of that war — followed by an against-all-odds turnaround felt to many like a miracle.
Shlomi said it is still too soon to make firm predictions about how long the current trend will last, given that the country is only now emerging from the crisis. Even so, he believes the scale of the war and the religious wave it produced were deep enough that, a decade from now, it will still be there.
And if the experience of Rozet Levy Dy Bochy’s husband, Peter Griekspoor, is any indication, the war may leave the country not only more observant down the line but with more Jews altogether.
At first, Rozet said, her husband responded in a “very European” way, seeking balance and “both-sides-ing” the situation. She told him that was a luxury of not being Jewish, but that “for us, something in our DNA reacts in moments like this. We’ve been here before.”
But it did not take long for the balance to tilt. As protests spread across Europe and North America and conspiracy theories about Israelis and Jews circulated online, Peter said he was “starting to feel like part of the narrative.”
“I felt the antisemitism was personal,” he said. “Now I actually feel like I’m Jewish. I feel like I want to be part of this people. They are beautiful, they are strong, they are resilient,” he said, before adding with a laugh, “and they are horrible also. Always arguing, always fighting each other.”
Shlomi said that while much of the revival grew out of a real desire for unity and belonging, some of it acquired a coercive edge, with some rabbis and others treating “returning” to faith as the only legitimate response and investing significant funding in amplifying it. “Tefillin and barbecues cost a lot of money,” he said.
He also noted that the rise in religious practice often moved in tandem with a political realignment, with some public figures openly embracing observance. On Channel 14’s flagship “Patriots” current-affairs show, rightwing host Yinon Magal now speaks frequently about becoming more observant since the war, a change that links faith with nationalist politics.
A number of survivors from the traditionally left-leaning kibbutzim on the Gaza border that were attacked on Oct. 7 have described similar movement in their own lives, adopting more religious practices, like remarrying in an Orthodox ceremony, and identifying more strongly with the right. JPPI survey data shows the same trend among Jewish youth, with a clear rightward drift across most political camps.
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Mizrachi, however, bucks that trend. A peace activist and board member of Standing Together, a grassroots Jewish-Arab movement that campaigned against the war, he has grown more observant without changing his politics.
“I am a Jew first, then an Israeli, then a democrat, then a Mizrahi,” he said. “I see God in every aspect of life. But I also ask, until when will we live by the sword and be filled with hate for Gazans? This isn’t the Jewish way.”
For Griekspoor, the Jewish way meant the halachic way, and for the past six months he has been enrolled in an Orthodox conversion program under the Israeli rabbinate, a track that mandates full observance of Jewish law. He says he knows his choice in becoming Jewish defies logic.
“You have the persecution, the hatred, the antisemitism — and you can’t eat cheeseburgers,” he said. “But there is no rational explanation. It’s stronger than me.”
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National Council of Jewish Women ejects LA chapter, other affiliates cut ties amid historic reboot
When wildfires blazed through Los Angeles last year, displacing tens of thousands of people, the local National Council of Jewish Women affiliate was well positioned to help. The national nonprofit’s LA chapter already ran donation drop-off sites across the city — its iconic thrift shops — and employed staff that knew how to sort the flood of donated items.
And after NCJW-LA chief executive Marjorie Gilberg sent an appeal to her members, colleagues at chapters in other cities also shared the letter with their own constituents. Hundreds of thousands of dollars soon poured in from outside of LA, and Gilberg’s nonprofit — which has focused on economic justice for decades — ultimately distributed more than $1 million in cash relief, donated goods and store vouchers to fire-affected families.
“It felt like a huge hug,” Gilberg said. “There was support coming from all these directions, from these women across the country to pull for LA. I was like, ‘Oh, this is what a network is for.’”
But last month, the chapter’s parent organization, the National Council of Jewish Women, cut ties with the LA group.
Citing a “strained” relationship, NCJW president Laura Monn Ginsburg informed Gilberg’s board May 8 that the national organization was terminating its affiliation with the LA chapter, whose $23 million annual budget is three times national’s size. NCJW gave the chapter 90 days to rebrand.
“Despite our good-faith efforts to preserve the affiliation,” Monn Ginsburg wrote, “the Board of Directors of NCJW, Inc., has concluded that continued affiliation with the LA section is no longer tenable.”
The collaborative response to the LA fires reflected one of the strengths that has made the National Council of Jewish Women a leading American social justice nonprofit movement for more than a century. The grassroots Jewish movement started out by seeding local sections and only established a national umbrella in the mid-20th century. As the parent group lobbied on progressive issues, dozens of local sections pursued that mission at the grassroots level in ways that served their local communities, working mostly independent of each other and collaborating when opportunities arose.
But that freedom for local chapters to choose their own priorities is now history. The Washington, D.C.-based parent organization, citing scores of section closures over the last two decades, is transitioning to a regional model focused more on political advocacy than community service. The national shakeup, which began in earnest last July, has already resulted in two sections closing and the decision by three more — in Arizona and Essex County, New Jersey, as well as LA — to break away from the national council. The movement’s six largest remaining chapters — as well as roughly 20 others in the network — may soon follow suit.
National leadership says the restructuring was necessary to prevent further closures, free local chapters from the burden of administration and allow the national organization to expand into places not currently served by the local model. And the group is betting that a tighter, advocacy-focused national agenda will effect greater political change locally and launch the Jewish women’s movement into the future.
“We want folks to take action that is more strategic, that is more thought through, to ensure that they are going to be more successful,” said Ellen Buchman, NCJW’s vice president of engagement and leadership. “We will never question whether the right people to do that is our grassroots — it always will be. The difference is how they will do it.”
But the uncertainty in the network points to a massive identity change for the legacy nonprofit, and to some, a tragic one. Leaders of some sections said moving away from community service work would not only abdicate a local responsibility, but also subtract a powerful Jewish presence from the front lines of American social justice during a time of rising antisemitism.
“We are a Jewish organization that has shown up in progressive places, we’ve shown up in women’s health, all these important issues across the country,” Gilberg said. “And they’re just tearing it down with no sense. It’s the worst possible time to be doing this to this kind of organization.”
A proud grassroots history
The story of NCJW reads like a progressive history of the United States — and in some ways, it is. The organization was founded in 1893 by women who had been invited to the participate in the Chicago World’s Fair, only to discover that the role others had intended for them was as hostesses pouring coffee. The organization originally focused on Jewish religious education for women and children, but quickly branched out to social welfare issues. Today, many of the movement’s 250,000 subscribers — the national group calls them advocates — are the children or grandchildren of lifetime members.
On virtually any American social concern you can think of since then — education, criminal justice reform, civil rights, abortion rights — NCJW, backed by the voices of hundreds of thousands of Jewish women, has been at the forefront of political advocacy.
On virtually any American progressive domestic cause you can think of today, there’s a National Council section pursuing it at the local level. And maybe only one; it’s often said in the NCJW network that if you know one section, you know — well, one section. Their efforts are wide-ranging and specialized: The Pittsburgh section operates a daycare center for children whose parents are required in court; Essex organizes an annual fair for low-income families to pick up free school supplies; Arizona runs a sexual assault trauma recovery center. The sections frequently partner with other local nonprofits, too — sometimes the only Jewish presence in those progressive spaces.
At its peak, the nonprofit had hundreds of sections — one veteran estimated as many as 200 in the post-Roe era. The national organization counted more than 125 in the early 2000s. But Jewish civic life across the country has since contracted, and younger members have grown scarce. There is no local chapter in the Washington metro area today — there were once five — or in some other major Jewish communities, including Boston and Philadelphia.
The 44 sections that remain today — that number does not include the three disaffiliating — range in size. Some have full staffs, thousands of members and budgets in the millions; others are fully volunteer-led, with a five-figure budget and a membership in the dozens.
They have enjoyed a symbiotic, mostly hands-off relationship with the national body. The nationally recognized legacy of NCJW helps the local chapters fundraise, and most sections are registered as 501(c)3 organizations under the national nonprofit’s group tax exemption. The sections pay dues according to their budget, and do the grassroots community work that bolster the national body’s credibility. They unite on certain national initiatives like Repro Shabbat, an annual abortion rights-themed Shabbat program held in 2,000 local communities, Buchman said.
“The organization does tremendous advocacy work nationally, so it does help us locally when we are doing our own advocacy work,” said Andrea Rakitta Mintz, the Essex chapter’s president. “But we are the ones who want to do the hands-on volunteering.”
A new national direction
Still, according to Buchman, the national vice president, the old system was unsustainable. “The antiquated 100-plus-year old system was not going to be able to continue if it was not going to be updated,” she said. For the national organization, it didn’t matter if the Los Angeles and Essex chapters were thriving if 10 or 20 other chapters were spiraling into dissolution.
And while the diversity of the sections was “wonderful,” Buchman said, it was also “something that we’re trying to reel in, so that through consistent advocacy as an organization we can have a greater impact, and be more of a household name.”
After bringing in a consulting firm to survey thousands of NCJW members and stakeholders, the national group formalized a new strategic plan, known as NCJW Forward, that replaced the sections with a regional staffing model. The plan established four core advocacy areas — reproductive rights, gender pay equity, family economic security, and combating antisemitism and hate — and included an increased focus on doing advocacy in Israel.
When it presented the formal plan to its sections in July 2025, NCJW offered them a choice: Integrate with the national organization — that is, turn over assets and donor lists and agree to the new structure — or disaffiliate. It gave sections until December 2027 to decide. Two of them, located in Greater Houston and Sarasota, closed in the next six months.
Buchman acknowledged the integration model would have staffing implications for both the national organization — which expects to hire up to 15 people over the next three years — and its affiliates. Some section staff will likely be let go upon integration with the national group, she said, and others may be kept on a case-by-case basis. Each section’s board of directors, meanwhile, would go from managing its affairs to serving as an advisory committee.
For some smaller sections, integration made sense. NCJW Miami, for example, already focused on reproductive justice advocacy, and it was fully board-run, with no staff. Integration meant surrendering independence, said Jessica Silver, a board member of the section, but it also came with additional national resources.
“We really don’t feel like we were giving up very much,” Silver said. “We can still really do everything that we want to do locally, and now we just have more of a partner in National in doing that work.”
The six additional sections integrating — whose budgets range from $30,000 to $200,000, according to Buchman — are Louisville, Minnesota, Colorado, Long Beach (California), Chicago North Shore, Kendall (Florida) and Utah.
Buchman said the three integrating sections with executive directors would be phasing them out. But NCJW Louisville’s executive director, Sarah Harlan, said the national organization had been flexible during the integration process, allowing her and her office administrator — the section’s only two employees — to stay on as contract staff.
Other volunteer-led sections, however, warned that integration would undermine decades of community work, if not squander it.
NCJW Arizona’s board president, Civia Tamarkin, said that though her section did not employ staff, merging was never an option. On a technical level, she said, her organization needed autonomy and local nonprofit status to advocate on state issues, serve on government advisory committees and partner with other Arizona-based nonprofits.
But she also did not trust NCJW staff for her region — which would be based in Denver, according to the strategic plan — to oversee Ruth Place, the trauma recovery center her section founded three years ago for survivors of sexual assault.
“It’s our Field of Dreams,” Tamarkin said. “We don’t want to lose that or turn it over to any other entity.”
The organization plans to rename itself the Jewish Women’s Action Alliance Arizona.
For larger sections, an uncertain future
When NCJW presented its sections in July 2025 with the option to integrate or break off, it offered a third route to the seven chapters whose budgets exceeded $750,000 — a new kind of affiliation. Affiliating sections would be required to commit to NCJW’s core issues; follow rules about how to allocate funds; and adopt the national group’s standards around Zionism, which include supporting a two-state solution.
The seven sections replied in September 2025 with a joint letter from their lawyers, Gilberg said, rejecting the proposal and outlining their concerns. She said the national organization has still not sent a letter in response. Buchman says the organization did respond, asking to meet in person rather than conduct a negotiation in writing.
Seven months later, without any changes to the affiliation proposal, Essex announced it was rebranding as Tovah, a decision that went into effect Monday.
Rakitta Mintz, the Essex president, felt the same way about her chapter’s signature programs as Tamarkin did about Ruth Place. The section’s Center For Women, which provides free career coaching to women re-entering the workforce, has helped 40 people get new jobs just this year. An annual fair where low-income families “shop” for free school supplies was another Essex hallmark she didn’t want threatened.
Neither of those efforts fits explicitly into the national organization’s four core advocacy issues. So while Rakitta Mintz was weighing the chapter’s options before cutting ties, she said she never saw the affiliation option as a real possibility.
“We did not want to lose our autonomy,” she said, “and we didn’t want to lose the ability to do our local hands-on volunteer work.”
The other five major sections — New York, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Michigan and St. Louis — entered mediation with the national organization, which pertained to possible changes to the organization’s bylaws. (A sixth section, Dallas, was offered affiliation later, and did not participate in the mediation.)
Buchman said those talks went well.
“We also feel strongly that we will come back to the table to make more progress,” she added. “We haven’t yet figured out when that will be, but we had not talked for months, and we have now, and that’s a sign of true progress.”
LA’s banishment stunned many in the network, including leaders of the other sections that had joined it in mediation. But it did not blindside Gilberg, who had been preparing for the possibility LA would be going independent by securing the section’s own IRS tax determination letter.
According to Buchman, the national vice president, the LA section’s work simply did not align with the NCJW vision.
“To us, the LA section does a beautiful job focusing solely on financial independence and economic security, and that’s never been what our organization has chosen to do,” Buchman said. “Certainly, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that economic justice isn’t part of our work to improve the lives of women, children, and families, but our priority issues are broader than that.”
Gilberg pointed to numerous places in NCJW Forward that seemed to highlight economic justice work, including on its page about family economic security, though its policy ambitions do not include cash assistance, which features in several ongoing NCJW LA programs.
“In their current policy priorities, there’s paid family leave — which is specifically an economic justice issue,” Gilberg said. “That’s one of their big four things.”
Buchman said 10 more sections were likely to integrate and estimated eight to 10 others were “on the fence.” She did not say which chapters fell in each category.
Those numbers, combined with the five departures and five in mediation, left about a dozen sections unaccounted for. Buchman, who joined NCJW two years ago with more than 30 years of nonprofit experience, said she didn’t know where those chapters stood.
But she didn’t regard disaffiliation or closure as a subtraction for the national group.
“It frees us up to meet our goals, which is to expand,” Buchman said. “There are cities that have advocates but no sections. Or legislative opportunities but no advocacy. Where we have donors but no fundraising.” She added that it was possible she’d send fundraisers into cities where disaffiliated sections continued to operate.
To some NCJW veterans, though, the breakup felt like a slow-motion collapse for an organization that once spoke for hundreds of thousands of Jewish women.
“A lot of people have a very nostalgic feeling for NCJW,” said Tamarkin, the Arizona section head. “They may be third-generation, fourth-generation and are very sad to see the federation broken up.
“On the other hand,” she continued, “times change, organizations change, and in such a competitive economic climate for nonprofits, every organization has to do what they are advised is the best route forward.”
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Trump says Netanyahu ‘turned his Troops around’ after he asked Israel not to bomb Beirut
(JTA) — U.S. President Donald Trump is claiming credit for another truce between Hezbollah and Israel, nearly two months after surprising both sides by declaring a ceasefire that has teetered ever since.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said nothing has changed in Israel’s approach to battling Hezbollah in Lebanon, where it is based.
“I had a conversation with Bibi Netanyahu today, asking him not to go into a major raid of Beirut, Lebanon. He turned his Troops around. Thank you Bibi!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Monday afternoon. “I also had a conversation with Representatives of the Leaders of Hezbollah, and they agreed to stop shooting at Israel, and its soldiers. Likewise, Israel agreed to stop shooting at them. Let’s see how long that lasts — Hopefully it will be for ETERNITY!”
The post followed another similar message published hours earlier in which Trump said “there will be no Troops going to Beirut, and any Troops that are on their way, have already been turned back.”
The posts came after days of heavy fighting in Lebanon, where multiple Israeli soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah drones and Israel spurred an evacuation in the outskirts of Beirut after warning that it would soon launch an operation against Hezbollah outposts there.
In a post of his own on X, Netanyahu confirmed that he had spoken with Trump but did not say that he had agreed to a ceasefire.
“Tonight, I spoke with President Trump and told him that if Hezbollah does not cease attacking our cities and citizens—Israel will attack terror targets in Beirut. This stance of ours remains unchanged,” Netanyahu wrote. “In parallel, the IDF will continue to operate as planned in southern Lebanon.”
The Lebanese Embassy in Washington, meanwhile, said in a statement that Lebanon had learned that Hezbollah had agreed to a U.S. proposal for a ceasefire.
The hostilities in Lebanon and northern Israel reflect a distinct front in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. When Trump declared a ceasefire in that war in early April, Israel at first maintained that it did not apply to Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy. But Trump insisted that Netanyahu cease fighting in Lebanon, too.
Two months later, Trump is still negotiating for a permanent end to the Iran war. On Monday, he said on CNBC that he found the talks to be “very boring” and did not care if the Iranians dropped out of discussions.
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Smotrich’s surprise appearance at Israel Day Parade sparks backlash from NY and Jewish leaders
(New York Jewish Week) — Amid a record crowd at New York’s annual Israel Day parade on Sunday, one participant is standing out.
A growing number of city, state and Jewish leaders are denouncing the participation of Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right Israeli minister who joined the march without having been announced in advance.
“The facts: Smotrich was NOT invited. Crashed at the last minute. Marched in the back of the parade. Not one New York public official joined him,” David Greenfield, the CEO and executive director of the Met Council, which sponsored a pre-parade breakfast for elected officials Sunday, wrote in a post on X.
Greenfield was responding to a groundswell of anger about Smotrich’s presence at the rally, which is typically framed as a broad Jewish communal celebration of Israel. While the inclusion of Israeli government officials has long been a sticking point for some who would prefer the parade to avoid politics, this year Smotrich’s presence in particular has proved galling for several prominent parade participants.
“Bezalel Smotrich is a far-right extremist whose hateful and divisive rhetoric is fundamentally at odds with the values we hold dear in New York,” Gov. Kathy Hochul, who joined the march, wrote in a post on X Monday. “Yesterday’s parade was a celebration of Jewish pride, community, and unity. I strongly condemn his participation.”
Attorney General Letitia James, who attended the parade, and New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores also condemned Smotrich on Monday.
The Israeli government had promised its largest-ever delegation this year, in part a show of strength at a time when New York City’s anti-Israel mayor, Zohran Mamdani, vowed to skip the parade. But it had not said that Smotrich, who recently said he believed he was facing International Criminal Court charges, would be among the group. Smotrich joined the parade after flying in from Israel early Sunday morning.
Mamdani condemned the inclusion of Smotrich and other ministers in the parade, telling MS Now in an interview published Monday that he was “offended” by their presence.
“You can see in the participation of the far-right Israeli minister Smotrich, as well as a number of other ministers, a vision of annihilation, a complicity in genocide, and frankly, a belief that does not have much value for even the sanctity of children in Gaza,” Mamdani said. “I am offended, as I know many New Yorkers are, by their participation.”
Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, has been sanctioned by several countries for inciting settler violence against Palestinians. The head of Israel’s far-right Religious Zionist Party, Smotrich has previously advocated for annexing the majority of the West Bank, called for the “total annihilation” of cities in Gaza, and said that it would be “justified and moral” to block humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.
On Friday, Mark Treyger, the CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which organizes the parade, said he did not know exactly which Israeli officials would be at the parade.
“We don’t have the full details as far as who is or who is not coming from the Israeli delegation,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time.
“That’s usually handled from the consulate office, and I will refer to them as far as handling that,” Treyger added. “But for me personally, it’s really not about politicians. It’s about the people that we are welcoming, as far as families across New York, the state, the region, folks coming in from across the country that are looking forward to this parade.”
For some of them, Smotrich’s participation was a blemish.
“Bezalel Smotrich should be sanctioned by American political and Jewish communal leaders – not marching alongside them in the streets of New York City,” the liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street wrote in a post on X. As a political organization, J Street does not officially participate in the parade, but its members typically march as part of liberal delegations.
Other liberal Jewish groups similarly criticized both Smotrich’s presence and New York politicians for participating in the same parade as the Israeli delegation.
“It is shocking to see New York officials march alongside Kahanists like Bezalel Smotrich and Otzma Yehudit members, whose support for illegal settlements and territorial expansion inspire violence, hatred and the further immiseration of the West Bank and Gaza,” New York Jewish Agenda wrote in a post on X.
“We are grateful to Mayor Mamdani for refusing to march in the Israel Day Parade, which featured some of the Israeli politicians who have not only cheered on the genocide of Palestinians, but are part of the government committing that genocide,” tweeted the left-wing group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, adding, “Shame on every elected official who marched yesterday.”
Israel had announced several participants in advance of the parade, including Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli and Immigration and Absorption Minister Ofir Sofer. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, who has said he wants to see Gaza flattened by a nuclear bomb and then resettled by Jews, was also on the list.
Tamar Glezerman, an organizer for Israelis for Peace, which took part in a small demonstration along the parade route to oppose the Israeli government delegation’s presence, told JTA Sunday that she was surprised to see Smotrich in the group.
“They hid that because the Israeli government is, you know, a group of cowards, and they don’t want to get pushback,” she said.
Treyger appeared to respond to the outcry on Monday, writing in a post on X that while “some individuals who attended were neither invited by JCRC-NY nor known to us in advance, participation in the parade is not an endorsement of any political figure or ideology.”
A spokesperson for JCRC declined to clarify whether Treyger was referring to Smotrich specifically.
“We reject rhetoric that dehumanizes others, fuels division, or diminishes the dignity of any human being,” Treyger continued.
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